Is 2018 over yet? Donald Trump wrung a whole lot of failure out of one long year

By Rick Wilson

Dec 30, 2018 | 5:00 AM

U.S. President Donald J. Trump smiles during the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives January 30, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)

A year ago this week, it was hard to imagine Donald Trump’s presidency would be more chaotic, unmoored and destructive than it was during 2017’s endless sewage flume of scandal, division, pettiness, incompetence and general lunacy. We often say, “What a difference a year makes.” In this case, it was a year that ended as it started for Trump and the nation: poorly.

This White House is, by every account, the least effective, cohesive and honest administration in history. Yes, I’m counting Grant, Polk and Jackson. The daily dose of indifference, incompetence and ignorance this White House vomits forth has left America exhausted. It’s no wonder Trump can’t hire the best people. Hell, he can barely hire people sitting around Penn Station begging for loose change.

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The worst job in Washington is that of Trump’s chief of staff. No one survives with their honor or sanity intact, which is why the departure of Gen. John Kelly left a void that had sensible people in D.C. running for the tall grass. Mick Mulvaney isn’t even CoS yet, and already the Twitter knives are out for him.

When it comes to my “Everything Trump Touches Dies” theory, the one case I prayed would be wrong was that of Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. A stable, sensible and smart force in a White House not known for those characteristics, Mattis finally reached the point where he couldn’t play the Trump game. When Trump ordered an immediate and ill-advised withdrawal of American forces in Syria and Afghanistan, Mattis had reached his limit. Defense secretaries don’t resign in protest, because most Presidents of both parties shared a fundamental commitment to putting our national security before that of Russia. Until now.

Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller, replacing the former Alabama senator with a former lawyer for an invention marketing company that offered products for time travel, Bigfoot detection and custom hot tubs...because of course he did.

White House duty is always hard, and that goes even more so for the mendacious Team of Bumblers who serve in every subcabinet job in this administration. Their sole scorekeeping mechanism isn’t whether they’re serving the American people but rather the monstrous ego, impetuous desires and daily demands of President Trump. As a result, those who tell the prettiest tales of his imagined glory are able to keep their jobs, even though their appearances on cable news leave ordinary Americans wondering how anyone could open their lie hole every day and still maintain even a scintilla of dignity. That dead-eyed stare you see in Sarah Sanders and Kellyanne Conway? It’s their souls leaving their bodies.

Trump’s year in foreign policy has been no less of a complete disaster, not only for his administration and for America, but for the security of the globe.

Let’s start with a perfect example of a con man getting conned. Trump may have fallen in love with Kim Jong Un of North Korea after their exchange of letters, sleepovers and pedicures, but the wee dictator of the Hermit Kingdom had other ideas. Far from delivering the world-shaking moment of denuclearization and peace Trump promised, the North Korean regime has continued to work on its nuclear delivery system aggressively, restarted its plutonium production lines and used the time they bought by rooking Trump to improve their position in the region.

In the Middle East, Trump’s precipitous pullout has ceded control of Syria to Iran, Syrian strongman Bashar Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He soft-pedaled the Saudi government’s murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, while his son-in-law Jared Kushner continues his bro-love affair with Mohammed Bin Sultan, the man on whose behalf Khashoggi was killed.

Speaking of Putin, everyone should have a lover at least once in their life who looks at them the way Trump looks at Putin. Utterly subservient, wholly hypnotized and entirely compromised, Trump is a singular American President in that he’s done everything to please Putin but making Vova’s mother’s borscht recipe.

Trump’s polling was held aloft in 2017 and early 2018 by a long run of economic good news. That good news — fueled first by the knock-on effect of the Fed’s decade of easy money, then by the sugar high stimulus of the tax bill — is fading, as the trade wars that were allegedly so easy to win, rising interest rates and a jittery stock market take their toll.

The markets are eyeing the exits, with the closing days of 2018 looking like a preview for something less sunny than the last decade. We’ll probably see a lot fewer triumphant tweets claiming credit for the market from the President whose base voters are convinced the reality TV star from “The Apprentice” can command the economy at will.

Those easy-to-win trade wars...aren’t. Ford lost a billion dollars because of higher steel and aluminum costs. Markets are closing to U.S. goods across the world. Midwest farmers are bleeding revenue due to the Trump Trade War, with — and follow along here, because it gets complicated. Trump’s administration is borrowing money from China to pay an emergency subsidy to farmers for the money they’re losing because Trump is in a trade war with — wait for it — China.

The idea that Trump would enter the 2020 election with a strong economy, a rock-solid all-in Trumpish House majority (remember the “Red Wave” he promoted so vigorously?) and his mojo intact have all been proven sadly wrong. Trump is begging for a Republican primary, and every Democrat with a pulse is lining up to take a shot at the weakest GOP incumbent imaginable.

Trump’s approval rating is permanently mired in the 40% range. Unwilling — and perhaps mentally unable — to speak to any part of America outside his base, and the modus Trumpendi of rallies and conspiracy theories like QAnon, he plays racist footsie with the lunatic fringe toward an upper limit where it’s not edgy or new; it’s just nuts.

We saw in the November election that Trump doesn’t translate or scale outside of the deepest red states. The GOP’s pickups in the Senate were in states where they’re supposed to win in the first place, and the House losses — 40 seats is a wave by any standard — were from suburban districts in which the GOP should have easily been able to compete. In a few red-state contests, candidates like Ted Cruz had near-political-death experiences.

Americans also witnessed the contrasts in our politics between Trump and his movement with two Republican leaders who passed. The deaths of Sen. John McCain and former President George Bush were a moment when the American people were reminded that character, spirit and a deep love of service were once motivations for American leaders.

In the case of both men, their heroic military service was a rebuke to Trump’s tough-talking but weak-willed record of draft deferments and time spent in nightclubs rather than the Pacific theater. You could practically hear Trump’s bone spurs grinding when America was reminded that Bush volunteered for flight training and flew 58 combat missions against the Japanese. We already know Trump’s contempt for McCain’s heroic service and sacrifice in Vietnam, but McCain had the last laugh at a man who represents the antithesis of his role as a happy warrior in politics, life and service.

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Trump can’t live up to their legacy, much less the legacies of other Presidents of either party. In some deep core, he knows how morally bankrupt his life has been, and that even his run for President started as a marketing prank that went out of control. He’s not happy being a servant of the people, and thus he’s miserable in this job.

A man who puts immigrant children in cages, spins up lurid fantasies about caravans of dusky-skinned murderers charging our borders and turns hatred of immigrants into a central pillar of his governing philosophy isn’t fit to be President. He’s barely suited to be an American.

Trump’s reputation as a lying liar who lies was solidified in 2018. His endless, constant, unfailing stream of lies and deceptions has become a punchline, and with over 7,000 outright falsehoods identified in his tweets, speeches and statements, it’s become the central definition of his brand.

And so we end the year as we began it, glued to the Twitter feed of a man whose addiction to our attention plays out as a tragicomedy every day. Trump’s 2018 was a long chain of disasters, pratfalls, mistakes, unforced errors and insults to the values and virtues of America.

As 2019 looms, Trump’s world is grim and miserable. A catalog of broken promises — how’s that Wall, Donald? — and unfulfilled commitments have stripped the luster off the reality TV star. With the Mueller investigation, a shaky economy, his friends and advisors either on their way to jail or desperately seeking to avoid it, and a realization that the Trump magic was always a con, this is a President on edge. The year 2018 was rough, but it just offered a preview of the hard ride ahead.

Wilson is author of “Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever.”